Chess Life Online is happy to welcome Joel as our new Q+A columnist. Send your Q's to [email protected]

Joel Benjamin has seen the board from many angles. At 13 years old he
became a national master. He broke Bobby Fischer’s record for the
youngest ever master and was hailed as a prodigy. In 1981 he breaked
from full time chess activity to attend Yale, where he majored in
history. He was editor in chief and founder of the witty but now
defunct magazine Chess Chow (1991-4), which ran articles with titles like “Eat Like a Grandmaster” and diagram captions such as: “Time Control to Major Tom.”

His most famous gig was in helping the Deep Blue IBM computer team to
defeat Garry Kasparov in 1997. Joel Benjamin was the official
Grandmaster consultant for the 1997 rematch (Deep Blue lost to Kasparov
in 1996). Joel trained the computer to think more positionally and thus
augment computers’ traditionally awesome calculation skills. Joel
enjoyed the discipline of his first 9-5 job (rare hours for chess
pros), and found that after the intense year working with Deep Blue,
his skills had improved. Shortly thereafter, Joel won his second U.S
Championship. In 2000, he won his third. Benjamin also goes into U.S
Championship history books for playing in a record 22 consecutive
championships.

Benjamin was featured in Game Over, a documentary about the Deep Blue-Kasparov.
The energetic but neurotic Kasparov contrasts with a cool and collected
Joel Benjamin, who calmly disputes Kasparov’s claims that Deep Blue was
aided during the games by a Grandmaster.

Joel plays offbeat
openings like the Two Knights’ Tango and the Pirc defense in order to
lead his opponents to uncharted chess waters. He doesn’t often win
straight from the opening, and is famous for squeezing out small edges.
He once called the British GM Michael Adams, #4 in the World a favorite
player, pointing out modestly that Michael had an even stronger version
of his own minimalistic but lethal style.

Joel claims that his
own training program as a teen wasnt very rigorous, but he improved
rapidly because of the “sponge” method. He went to as many tournaments
as he could, and absorbed as much information from other people’s games
and analysis, not just his own.